after upgrading to mate1.6 my terminal is not working, when i click on mate-terminal from menu, i only get a rotating cursor for a few seconds then nothing.as a workaround i have installed xfce4 terminal

It looks like a upstream bug. When you launch mate-terminal through xterm (or any other terminal emulator of your liking) it displays something like "floating point exception" (I'm using a Spanish environment, that's an approximate translation).